Steve Howell wrote:
> suggest that articles (as builtins) are just
> somehow *wrong* in programming languages. Yet they're
> so incredible popular in "natural" languages.
Popularity of a given feature in natural languages
doesn't necessarily imply optimality -- it could
just be a result of those languages having a common
ancestor.
Linguists have concluded that most of the languages
in use today, even ones that seem very different,
can be traced back to a single ancestral language.
--
Greg